https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/11/arts/fran-lebowitz-emerson-colonial/?p1=Article_Recirc_Most_Popular
Fran Lebowitz: ‘This is not kind of like what the Nazis did. This is precisely what the Nazis did’
The writer and commentator comes to the Emerson Colonial for a speaking engagement on Feb. 19
Fran Lebowitz describes herself as “angry since birth.” Given the conduct of the administration of President Donald J. Trump, it doesn’t appear that her general mien will be changing anytime soon.
The outrages, she said in a recent interview, are coming “every 20 minutes...every two seconds.” She recalls one incident not that long ago. “I have a very clear recollection of standing in my hotel room in Salt Lake City in front of the television set. I was alone in my room, and I said aloud, ‘He knocked down the White House!’ Because you can’t imagine this stuff. I mean, some of it you can, but that I certainly could not.”
Lebowitz, who comes to the Emerson Colonial Theatre for a speaking engagement on Feb. 19, established herself in her 20s as an essayist, a witty observer of the manners and mores of contemporary urban life. Her pieces were collected in two celebrated volumes, “Metropolitan Life” (1978) and “Social Studies” (1981), and she made regular stops on late night TV.
After that, her published writing slowed to a trickle. Her last new book was a children’s book, “Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas” (1994). (She has called her writer’s block a “writer’s blockade.”) But she continued to show up on TV, including a recurring role as a judge on “Law & Order,” and she played a judge in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” She also became a popular public speaker. Two Scorsese documentary portraits, the film “Public Speaking” (2010) and the Netflix TV series “Pretend It’s a City” (2021), solidified Lebowitz’s reputation as a scathing — and very funny — critic of our times.
At the Colonial, she will follow her usual format: taking questions from a moderator (in this case, Christine Jacobson, an associate curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library), and then from the audience. These evenings with Lebowitz can range far and wide, from politics to her experiences with a wide-ranging group of friends and associates in the New York world of arts and culture: Scorsese, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jerome Robbins, and Charles Mingus, to name a few.
I spoke to Lebowitz, 75, on the phone from her apartment in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood following the weekend in January when Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, was shot to death in Minneapolis by federal agents. Earlier last month, an ICE agent in Minneapolis had shot and killed another US citizen, Renee Good. Clearly the state of the union had taken a very dark turn from the days when some of Lebowitz’s sharpest invective was aimed at Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, or when her most vocal exasperation concerned whether incumbent presidential candidate Barak Obama could bounce back from a disastrous first debate with challenger Mitt Romney.
“Of all the horrible things he [Trump] does — which is every single thing he does — this stuff, this immigration stuff, is to me the worst,” Lebowitz told me. “It’s the most stomach-turning. It’s enraging and heartbreaking.”
Citing video of the Pretti shooting, Lebowitz said, “The cruelty of this administration and the people in it is pretty shocking.” Hinting at her own oft-cited misanthropy, she added, “The average person is not a wonderful being, but [they’re] better than this.”
Lebowitz described herself as “a pretty conventional New Deal Democrat. Many of my friends have always been way to the left of me, and I’ve always argued with them. I’ve spent decades saying to people, ‘No, no, you’re not right. No, this isn’t like Hitler.’”
But things have changed, she said. “This is exactly like Hitler. This is exactly what the Nazis did. This is not kind of like what the Nazis did. This is precisely what the Nazis did.”
Lebowitz’s ire for Trump and the Republicans is unlimited, but neither is she happy with her fellow Democrats, New Deal or not. “A lot of people I know, including myself, who are Democrats, have a lot of rage at the Democrats that are in Congress,” not because they’re unable to bring about change, “but because they’re so pacific about it. One of the things that a politician should do is express the feelings of the people. And [House minority leader] Hakeem Jeffries is just not the man for the moment. He is so mild, you would think he was discussing a little spat half the time. He’s intelligent, his politics are fine, but we want to see more rage, because it’s outrageous.”
In describing the cruelty of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Lebowitz recalled asking a Brazilian woman who once worked for her about her family. “She said, ‘We never go out. . . . We just go to work. The kids go to school. That’s it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because I see there’s a lot of policemen in my neighborhood.’ I said, ‘So what?’ And then I remember saying very proudly — and this is, like, 1984 — ‘Don’t worry about it. In this country, the policemen are not the soldiers. They don’t care about this. They’re not allowed to even do anything about it. And they don’t think about it. Don’t worry about the policemen unless you rob a store or steal a car. The policemen are only interested in crime. They’re not interested in where you’re from.’ And now the soldiers are the policemen.”
And as for the Republicans, “I never knew they hated the country so much. I mean, if you hate the United States this much, then there’s plenty of places you could live. Like Moscow. The happiest person on the planet must be Putin. He must be thinking, ‘We have been trying to do this to you people for 70 years, but it never occurred to us that you’d do it to yourselves.’ ”
As for her anger, Lebowitz said she’s coping better than some of her friends, because she’s used to being angry. “But I am not used to Donald Trump, and I never will be. It would be a terrible thing for people to get used to this.”
AN EVENING WITH FRAN LEBOWITZ
At Emerson Colonial Theatre, Boston, Feb. 19, 7 p.m. Tickets: $48.80 - $73.20, www.emersoncolonialtheatre.com
Jon Garelick can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.